


Tears for Everything

by petofi



Category: Cobra Kai (Web Series), Karate Kid (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Johnny Lawrence needs a hug, Male Friendship, Men Crying, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:29:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29233056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petofi/pseuds/petofi
Summary: "Johnny had been a sensitive child until karate trained it out of him."In which Johnny grows up and learns not to cry. And later learns from the people who care about him that crying is okay.
Relationships: Daniel LaRusso & Johnny Lawrence
Comments: 17
Kudos: 49





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> From the [Crying!Johnny](https://cobrakaikink.dreamwidth.org/702.html?thread=8894#cmt8894) prompt on the kink meme, but without the pairing. I've been sitting with this for a few weeks. Finally decided to post it.

Johnny had been a sensitive child until karate trained it out of him. 

When he was little, very little, he had clung to his mom like a limpet and hid from all the things that were overwhelming. The world was too much for him; such a happy, sad, angry, emotional place. He watched in awe as the sun turned the sky red and gold as it set each evening. His heart pounded hard and he shook when the people upstairs stomped around on the thin floorboards and yelled at each other. He wouldn’t look out the window for days after the morning he peeked out and saw the splayed out body of the neighborhood cat after it had been hit by a car. Later the man across the street had picked up the cat with a shovel and dumped it in a trash can. Johnny cried and cried.

Johnny cried about a lot of things. Sometimes he cried quietly; like each time his mom moved them to a new apartment when she lost or found a job. Or when he was sick or his tummy ached. Sometimes he cried big and loud; like when he had nightmares. Or when he realized his father was not coming home tonight, or the next night or the one after that. He stomped his little foot and cried when his mother wouldn’t let him stay up past his bedtime.

He bawled his eyes out when Old Yeller died onscreen and after that he made sure to hug every dog that crossed his path. When one of them bit his pudgy toddler arm he could barely scream from the sudden pain and terror. But more than that he felt a deep sense of betrayal that his affection had been rebuffed and then repaid in hurt. 

He cried silently and with a smile on his face on his sixth birthday when his mom made a special cake for him and told him that she loved him more than anything in the world. There were no presents that birthday, but it would always be one of his favorites. 

One day when he was old enough, his mom took him to an art museum. It was the first and last time they went to an art museum. He giggled when he saw the statues of naked people. He was amazed that they would be displayed out in the open like that. He was indifferent to the colorful blocks and splatters of modern art, but as his mother led him through a gallery full of nineteenth century paintings he stopped. There was a girl in a blue dress, surrounded by flowers that glowed under the rising dawn. Johnny didn’t know or care who painted it. All he knew was that it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

His mom stopped a few feet away when she realized he was no longer following. When she turned around Johnny had tears running down his cheeks as he stared at the painting. 

“What’s wrong, baby?” she asked. He just shook his head, unable to speak. She studied his face for a moment to confirm that these were his happy tears. Then she picked him up even though he was getting too big to be picked up. She held him on her hip and he lay his head on her shoulder and they looked at the painting for a long, long time. 

It was a few years later that Johnny’s mom got married to her second husband. She looked like an angel in her flowing wedding dress. The neckline and the edges of the sleeves sparkled with glass beads. Johnny was allowed in the room while she got ready. 

“Oh, sweetie,” she wiped the tears off his cheeks. 

There was very little family at the wedding. Sid invited colleagues and business associates who appreciated a good party and an open bar. The sparkles and the flowers were all for show. Johnny was excited and apprehensive about his new stepdad. He really wanted a dad, but he also didn’t want to share his mom. 

He sat in the front row with Sid’s sister and she put her arm around him and ruffled his hair as he cried through the ceremony. He stayed with her for a few days while Sid took his mom on a honeymoon in the Bahamas. When they got back, Johnny officially moved into Sid’s giant house and discovered that the fairytale ending wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.

_You’re too old to be crying. What are you, a baby? Stop being such a wimp._

Johnny wasn’t allowed to cry in Sid’s house. His mom and Sid argued about it a lot, but Sid just didn’t understand. So Johnny tried not to feel things too much. 

He found that music could block out arguments, conversations, and sad or happy news. If he built up walls he could hide his emotions behind them. Once he joined Cobra Kai he found that hiding wasn’t good enough. 

Men didn’t cry. Men didn’t do emotions, even the ones hidden behind walls. Kreese taught him to contain them, repress them. Johnny learned to lock them up so tight that he sometimes didn’t know even what they were anymore. Feeling things got confusing. He worked out a system that helped him make sense of it. There were only two sides to emotion. Happiness, satisfaction, pride; those were one side and he was allowed to release those with a laugh, a smile, a discreet fist pump; something cool and restrained. On the other side was anger. Johnny realized early on that fear was anger and sadness was anger. Humiliation was anger. Doubt, pain, confusion; all these were anger. It was better to be angry than to be hurt. 

Anger was the easiest feeling to deal with. As a child he cried when he was angry, but as a Cobra he punched things or broke them. Destruction was release. It was the only acceptable release. 

When he started dating Ali he was fifteen years old and still perfecting his system. He still had some windows in his walls so Ali could see through to some of what he thought he needed to hide. Slowly under Kreese’s training he bricked up those windows until no one could peer into him at all. Ali didn’t like that.

She broke one of the walls when she dumped him. He hid in his room and cried and tried to turn the pain into anger, but he felt it too keenly. He took the broken bricks and piled them up again, but they no longer fit quite right.

The structural damage was done, and LaRusso easily broke through Johnny’s already fragile walls when he kicked Johnny at the All Valley tournament. Something got through, emotions Johnny didn’t even know how to define crowded out the anger and bubbled to the surface. The chaos of emotion was let loose in tears as Johnny handed the trophy over. Later more tears poured out as he knelt over broken glass and gasped for breath. LaRusso and the old man walked away; job done. They didn’t bother to help Johnny rebuild what they had helped break down. 

It was harder not to feel things after that. The walls were too cracked and full of holes and Johnny had to resort to hiding again. 

And then he made friends with alcohol. Loyal, supportive alcohol.

It kept things numb. He didn’t feel much under an alcoholic haze. It started simply. He drank when he started feeling overwhelmed; feeling again like that little kid who clung to his mother. The world was too much and if Johnny couldn’t cry it out, then he needed to dull it down. 

“Oh, sweetie,” his mom would say when he came to Sunday dinner with beer breath and a slight buzz. 

Sid, karate, his mom, Shannon, money, crappy jobs, shitty apartments, a baby on the way, absent fathers, indifferent neighbors, bad teachers, missed birthdays, piles of responsibilities and no outlet except anger and destruction. He needed the beer; couldn’t figure out how to live without it.

Johnny visited his mom when she was in the hospital. She was too pale and her eyes seemed too large for her face. Her hair was thin and limp and she touched Johnny’s cheek with a boney hand that he didn’t want to believe was hers.

“You have to cry for me, baby,” she told him. She ran her thumb under his dry eye. “Let those tears out or it’s going to tear you apart.”

The next month Johnny cried at her funeral for her. Sid, for once, had nothing to say about it. 

The only person who had understood Johnny was gone. Shannon hadn’t understood the tears clinging to his lashes when he first felt their baby kicking against her swollen belly. She didn’t like to see him cry. She didn’t understand that he wasn’t sad or upset, but was just feeling the wonders of being alive. And so alcohol remained Johnny’s best friend because it was easier to not feel anything than to feel things the way he did. He found that the best way to avoid things was to drown himself in beer.

Sometimes he stopped drowning just long enough to come up to the surface and take a quick look around. His life was a failure on all levels. Crappy apartment, bitter ex, estranged son, crummy job, no friends or family. Then he’d sink back down again because when he was drowning he couldn’t feel how worthless he had become.

He tried not to think about what his mom used to tell him. “You’re beautiful, Johnny. Especially when you to let yourself feel.”


	2. Chapter 2

Daniel would have never guessed that Johnny was a natural crier.

Johnny had managed to hide it for a long time; learned the tricks he needed to ignore it. So at first Daniel thought the tears were a fluke. It was New Year’s Eve. Daniel and Amanda always hosted a big party. They’d invited Johnny as an act of goodwill, but without expecting him to show up. He had shown up and even brought his own beer just in case Daniel’s drink selection was full of ‘namby-pamby cocktails’. 

The drink selection was indeed mostly cocktails, but with Amanda acting as bartender there was nothing namby-pamby about them. Anyone drinking cocktails at a LaRusso party would be taking a cab home by the end of the night. The Mai Tai Johnny was eventually convinced to drink shouldn’t have tipped him over the edge, but Daniel later found him sitting on one of the chairs beside the pool with his face in his hands. He didn’t even try to wipe the tears away when Daniel sat on the chair beside him.

“This year sucked, man,” Johnny said. Daniel patted him on the shoulder. He didn’t realize then that the year had laid waste to Johnny’s carefully constructed coping mechanisms. 

Crying while drunk wasn’t a big deal, but Daniel knocked on Johnny’s door a few weeks later and Johnny wasn’t drunk, but he was crying again. He wiped at his eyes and ducked his head as he let Daniel in. 

“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked in concern.

“Nothing, nothing. It’s just–“ Johnny gestured to the TV where Chappie’s plane was going down in Iron Eagle. 

“You’re crying over a movie?”

“Fuck, man! What do you want?” Johnny pressed his hands to his eyes for a moment and then crossed his arms over his chest; aggressive and crying and oddly vulnerable in a way that Daniel didn’t know how to deal with. He was on his way to the monthly meeting of the All Valley Tournament Committee and had only stopped by to have Johnny sign the paperwork to enter their dojo. Johnny signed it and Daniel left and they didn’t talk about it again. 

Daniel assumed this crying was out of character, but he decided to ask around. Shannon said Johnny used to cry sometimes for no apparent reason. Sometimes he’d cry quietly when he was building block towers with Robby. She discouraged this because it was strange and upsetting and Robby didn’t need more of Johnny’s mixed signals in his life. She also revealed, with the smirk of an unsympathetic ex, that Johnny almost always cried during sex.

Carmen too had noticed a new trend. She used to see Johnny get teary-eyed when he was drunk or hurting, but now he was crying when he was sober and when nothing bad was happening. And yet he seemed happier, more stable, less drunk, and generally more confident in a way that he hadn’t been since the last All Valley Tournament.

And then Kreese ruined it again. 

Johnny said that he’d sit in at the next All Valley Committee meeting. A favor to Daniel; to be more involved, to take an interest in the wider karate community. When Daniel arrived he found Johnny and Kreese in the hallway having what looked like a very intense argument; Johnny with tears in his eyes. 

“What’s going on?” Daniel asked as he came to stand by Johnny’s side. 

“Ah, Mr. LaRusso,” Kreese greeted smugly, “I was just telling Mr. Lawrence how well his son is progressing under my tutelage. Quite like his father.”

“You son of a–“ Johnny started but was interrupted when the door to the meeting room opened.

Ron stepped out and regarded the scene. “Is there a problem here?”

“We’re good,” Daniel forced a smile.

“Hey, weren’t you the AA guy with the banned dojo?” Ron glanced at Johnny’s red rimmed eyes and strained face, then leaned toward Daniel and said in a stage whisper. “Is he doing okay? Those meetings can be tough, bring up a lot of past trauma.”

“I’m not traumatized, I’m fucking angry!” Johnny turned away, hands clenched into fists. One fist came up as if he were getting ready to throw a punch and Daniel put a steadying hand on his arm.

“You always were a crier, weren’t you?” Kreese scoffed. “Happy, sad, angry; you had tears for everything.” He turned to Daniel and shrugged. “It took a while to break him of the habit. Luckily, his stepfather wouldn’t put up with this nonsense either.”

“Fuck you!”

“Okay, okay,” Daniel pulled Johnny away and found a quiet corner down the hall. The man was a strange mixture of stiff and compliant, tough with fragile edges. Daniel rubbed his hand up and down Johnny’s arm in an attempt at comfort and wondered how he could help protect those jagged, shattered little pieces of Johnny that others seemed to so carelessly break. “Johnny, what’s wrong?” 

“I thought I was over it. I thought I had fixed it.”

“Fixed what?”

“The fucking crying!” Johnny lurched out of Daniel’s grasp and Daniel held up his hands placatingly.

“So this isn’t a new thing for you?”

“No one ever gets it,” Johnny scrubbed his face with his hands. “My mom understood, but everyone else just tells me to stop crying over nothing. But it doesn’t feel like nothing!”

“Ok, ok. I want to understand.” Daniel said sincerely, “Can you explain it to me?” 

Johnny shrugged. “I don’t know why. It’s just how I used to deal with things. There’s so much out there,” he waved a hand vaguely around him and then put it to his chest and closed his eyes as more tears gathered on his lashes, “and it’s like it gets inside of me. It hurts to keep it there, but I have to do it. I have to lock it up because it’s not okay to cry like this.”

“What if it is okay?”

“It’s not,” Johnny shook his head and wiped his eyes. “Men don’t cry.”

After that run in with Kreese, Johnny stopped crying. Instead he went back to drinking. The kids knew about Johnny’s unhealthy relationship with alcohol. It was no secret that he was a functioning alcoholic. But this was bad. It was affecting his ability to teach. His focus wavered, his coordination was noticeably lacking. Daniel spent more than one night tracking Johnny down and pulling him out of a cheap bar.

“What are you doing?” Daniel hissed the third time he found himself buckling Johnny into the passenger seat, nose wrinkled at the stink of Johnny’s breath.

“Dulls it down, man,” Johnny slurred. “Drowns it out. Can’t feel.”

So Daniel called in the big guns. He sent the kids off to his mother’s house for a night. Then he invited Johnny to dinner and let Bobby Brown answer the door when he arrived. Bobby had the magic touch. No one else but Miguel was allowed to touch Johnny so freely and so fiercely. By the end of the night Johnny was sobbing into Bobby’s chest while the other man held him close and whispered assurances in his ear. 

“Can you make sure everyone understands?” Daniel asked Sam and Miguel later. “Johnny feels things differently than most people and he just... he reacts by crying. It’s how he processes emotions.” Miguel and Sam nodded seriously. Daniel continued, “So, I need everyone to be really cool about it. Don’t act surprised, don’t call attention to it. Just let him work it out when he needs to. We need to show him that it’s okay.”

Johnny was more accustomed to the intensity of the world than he had been as a child, but he still needed to cry it out sometimes. Sometimes it was merely a wet sheen in his eyes, or a few tears down his cheeks. Sometimes it was a scrunched up face and sobbing breaths hidden behind his hands. The people who knew him best learned to pat him on the back and let him get on with it. With this encouragement Johnny stopped trying to drink the tears away. He cried in Daniel’s car when his mom’s favorite song came on the radio. He cried the day Miguel proved he was back to full strength by kicking in three boards. He cried one evening as they sat alone on Mr. Miyagi’s porch and reminisced about the past. Daniel started carrying a travel pack of tissues in his pocket.

When the All Valley Karate Tournament arrived Daniel had packs of tissues in both pockets. The atmosphere in the room was an intense mix of excitement, anxiety, pride, disappointment, joy; and Johnny, trying to process all the emotional energy in the room, was constantly swiping his hand across his eyes as he coached his kids through each match. He patted their shoulders with tears in his eyes when they lost; he smiled and cheered them on with tears in his eyes when they won. Between matches Daniel pulled him into a quiet corner to dry his face and give him a moment to calm.

Kreese stood on the other side of the auditorium as stoic as a statue. 

And then Hawk went up against Robby. Daniel’s anxiety ratcheted up a few notches. Hawk prepared himself on the mat while Daniel and a currently dry-eyed Johnny stood to the side in support. Kreese had his arms crossed, his expression one of grim satisfaction. His eyes flicked from Hawk to Johnny and then he turned to Robby. He was still speaking to Robby when Johnny suddenly launched himself across the mats. He pushed at Kreese, yelling at him to “stop hurting my kids, you fucking psycho!”

As two security officers removed Johnny from the arena, Hawk met Daniel’s eyes and nodded. He’d be fine, so Daniel followed them into the hallway. Johnny didn’t struggle against them, but he was openly sobbing and shouting something about parking lots and broken glass. The officers pushed him back against the wall while Daniel tried to calm him down.

“Johnny, Johnny. Hey,” Daniel put his hands on Johnny’s shoulders. 

“He told Bobby to take you out. He didn’t think I could win it,” Johnny sobbed. “He made Bobby bust your knee.”

“I know. I know. Bobby apologized again later.” He moved his hands up to Johnny’s face and brushed away some of the tears. 

Johnny closed his eyes and shook his head, gasping for breath but still needing to talk about this. “Sweep the leg. He said to ’sweep the leg.’ And he was so mad because I still lost and I wasn’t supposed to cry.”

“I know. I know,” Daniel said fervently, meaning _It’s okay. It’s in the past. We’re okay._

Johnny took a few gulping breaths and looked at Daniel. “Shit, man. Why are you crying too?”

Daniel’s laugh was wet because his nose was clogging up and his vision was blurry. He could feel the tears running down to his chin even as he continued to brush Johnny’s away. “I don’t know.”

The officers had backed off. One of them had even gone to fetch a medic. Daniel waved them away as he composed himself. Johnny was still crying, but he subsided into his quiet tears. 

“Dad?”

Daniel turned to see Robby and Hawk standing a few feet away. They both looked very serious, but they stood shoulder to shoulder. 

“What happened?” Daniel asked. 

“We both forfeited,” Hawk said. 

“I’m off the team,” Robby shrugged. He looked to his dad. Johnny opened his arms and pulled Robby to him. 

Daniel put his arm around Hawk’s shoulders and led him back into the arena. The finals were starting. Sam was up against Tory. It must have been Johnny’s influence because Daniel felt the tears start to gather again as his chest swelled with pride for this daughter he’d had the honor of raising. She fought well and after she won she held out her hand to help Tory up. 

Later Daniel and the kids found Johnny and Robby sitting against the wall in the hallway. They both looked exhausted but didn’t turn down the invitation for celebratory post-tournament pizza. Daniel soon ran out of tissues because Johnny cried happy tears all night.


End file.
